DJ Spooky's Nauru Elegies

Trailer from DJ Spooky's new project, "The Nauru Elegies: A Portrait in Sound and Hypsographic Architecture" In the artist's statement, he quotes Richard Wagner, Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (The Artwork of the Future, 1849): "As Man stands to Nature, so stands Art to Man."

I just learned about a fascinating new project by Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) and Annie K. Kwon. Paul writes:

Currently, I'm shooting a film on the remote island of Nauru for the next 2 months, for a project that that will be presented in Yokohama, Japan in several months. In the last couple of years, I've sought out sources connecting environmental issues to economics from places as remote as Antarctica to Nauru and Angola, Singapore, and Namibia. The basic idea is to shoot a series of acoustic portraits of various landscapes - financial, physical, quantum, and relativistic. The project is inspired by the world of large numbers and dimensionality one finds in stories like Edwin Abbott's "Flatlands" and material from Harvard economists Pine and Gilmore's investigation into vitrual economics "The Experience Economy." I'm in a very remote spot, economics and contemporary art are the modus operandi of the "Nauru Elegies" scenario. How do you make a music composition out of economic transactions?

From the project site:

The Nauru Elegies project looks at the combination of unique qualities that make a remote place like Nauru a core member of the 21st century global economy: It explores an island in a state of environmental collapse. The music component of the Nauru Elegies reflects colonial and postcolonial issues facing the digital economy of the 21st century translated into a string quartet, composed by Paul D. Miller/DJ Spooky, while the architectural component conceptualized by Annie K. Kwon spatializes and formalizes otherwise invisible economic flows and irreversible ecological devastation. A new architecture reclaims a local hypsographic territory at a culmination of global currents.

The poet Goethe once wrote: “architecture is nothing but frozen music.” The Nauru Elegies asks what happens if we reverse engineer that process through on-site recordings and footage translated through the prism of music and architectural form?

We are big fans of Paul's work. His writings and art, we believe, place him among the pantheon of great artist philosophers of our time. He is a true beacon of the Imagination Age.